An economist walks into a bar...

First, HOLY COW IT'S BEEN A WHILE. Well, that's what having a baby will do to you, I suppose. That, and Twitter. I'm still recovering, but in the meantime, I'll be posting some short stuff I wrote that didn't, for whatever reason, end up in print. Some of it is...old. But still fun! Enjoy.

Cheers,
Nathan E. Science

Liquor is big business in the U.S., and with drunk drivers involved in about 40 percent of traffic fatalities, it’s also a serious public health threat. Acting on the assumption that drinking leads to increasingly risky decisions, many states prohibit happy hours or serving alcohol to clearly intoxicated people. But is the “more liquor, worse choices” axiom correct?

To find out, a team of economists armed with a breathalyzer and a laptop headed to a bar in New York’s Lower East Side. Once there, they asked 317 men and women of varying inebriation to make different bar-oriented decisions—between different combinations of sliders and dumplings, or between different cash lotteries—all the while looking for subtle inconsistencies in their subjects’ choices. Remarkably, even stumbling-drunk participants made sensible choices. The main exception: as they drank more, women became slightly more comfortable taking risks when choosing between lotteries.

If confirmed by further experiments, the results suggest that efforts to curb drunk driving or other negative consequences of drinking should focus on making better decisions while drinking rather than on discouraging drinking in the first place. The paper appeared last June in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.

In case you missed it...

A few, short, cool stories I did for ScienceNOW. Check them out. Comment and ask me questions in the comments!

When Predators Attack!
Watch out!

Toward Shatterproof Glass
Possibly helpful when dealing with predators.

"A Snapshot of the Inside of an Atom" at ScienceNOW

My first story for ScienceNOW in quite a long time, and it's a fun one. Scientists at FOM Institute AMOLF took a picture of the quantum wave function of electrons as they emerged from hydrogen atoms.

Wave function? AMOLF? Google the latter. As for the former, the wave function is the fundamental piece of quantum weirdness, something that physicists have tried to wrap their heads around for eighty or ninety years — and failed. For more, read the story.

These are a few of my favorite sciences.

What's your favorite thing about the natural world? There are lots of things to choose from. The profound tension between natural selection and biological diversity. The fact that no matter how fast you're going, you'll never catch up with a beam of light. The way snowflakes form.

Physicists Create Black Hole 'Light' in Lab at ScienceNOW

ScienceNOW just posted a story I wrote on a really exciting experiment: